The Death of Virgil

hermann broch jean starr untermeyer

It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his consciousness, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch fashioned one of the great works of twentieth-century modernism, a book that embraces an entire world and renders it with an immediacy that is at once sensual and profound.

Begun while Broch was imprisoned in a German concentration camp, The Death of Virgil is part historical novel and part prose poem - and always an intensely musical and immensely evocative meditation on the relation between life and death, the ancient and the modern.

Genres fictionhistorical fictionclassicsgerman literaturepoetryliteraturenovels20th centuryphilosophyliterary fiction

493 pages, Paperback

First published June 1,1945

Places

rome, brindisi,

This edition

Format: 493 pages, Paperback
Published: January 15, 1995 by Vintage
ISBN: 9780679755487
ASIN: 0679755489
Language: English

Characters More characters

Publius Vergilius Maro

Publius Vergilius Maro (October 15, 70 BC – September 21, 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He wrote three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Ge...
Augustus

Caesar Augustus (born Gaius Octavius; 23 September 63 BC – 19 August AD 14), also known as Octavian, was the founder of the Roman Empire; he reigned as the first Roman emperor from 27 BC until his death in AD 14.[a] The reign of Augustus initiated an impe...

About the author

hermann broch

Broch was born in Vienna to a prosperous Jewish family and worked for some time in his family's factory in Teesdorf, though he maintained his literary interests privately. He attended a technical college for textile manufacture and a spinning and weaving college. Later, in 1927, he sold the textile factory and decided to study mathematics, philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna.

In 1909 he converted to Roman Catholicism and married Franziska von Rothermann, the daughter of a knighted manufacturer. This marriage dured until 1923.

He started as a full-time writer when he was 40. When "The Sleepwalkers," his first novel, was published, he was 45. The year was 1931.

In 1938, when the Nazis annexed Austria, he emigrated to Britain after he was briefly arrested. After this, he moved to the United States. In his exile, he helped other persecuted Jews.

In 1945 was published his masterpiece, "The Dead of Virgil." After this, he started an essay on mass behaviour, which remained unfinished.

Broch died in 1951 in New Haven, Connecticut. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize and considered one of the major Modernists.